The Andromeda Project

Last week we launched a brand new Zooniverse site: The Andromeda Project. We’re asking people to spot star clusters in the Andromeda galaxy in data from the Hubble Space Telescope. You might think it sounds like menial work but it’s strangely addictive – and incredibly useful for the researchers behind the data.

The Zooniverse strives to take so-called data deluge problems and turn them on their head, creating awesome websites where the public can do the grunt work – only it’s fun! Many Zooniverse projects take a task that would once have been done by a lowly grad student for months or years – and frees them up to do the more complex data reduction and analysis tasks. Spotting star clusters in Andromeda requires no special training – just a few examples and some enthusiasm. In this way we (the Zooniverse) try and crowdsource many problems, from classifying galaxies by their shape, to listening the bat calls. You can see all the current projects at http://www.zoonivere.org

The Andromeda Project launched as part of the Zooniverse Advent Calendar, which began with our new publications page. This page shows the growing collection of peer-reviewed papers that result from Zooniverse volunteers clicking on our various sites. These papers are the whole point: all Zooniverse projects aim to produce real science results, offering the chance for anyone to be involved in science.

Andromeda is going well: with nearly 600,000 classifications performed already: a task that would have taken a researcher years! All this in less than a week. As I write this, the community of 8,000 users that has amassed around the project is currently classifiying images at a rate of 1 per second!